The Magic Lantern

A masterful addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum by Steven Holl
Architects brightens the landscape of midtown Kansas City and pushes
the limits for daylighting exhibition spaces.

A series of translucent glass pavilions cascades down a hillside in
the Country Club Plaza district of Kansas City, brightening the evening
landscape with the pale blue glow of refracted fluorescent light. From
the outside they appear to be separate buildings, minimalist ice blocks
popping up out of the Kansas City Sculpture Park with no purpose except
to stand there and look pretty. It’s not until you get inside,
especially during the day, that you understand their real magic:
everything that happens on the outside for the sake of spectacle has a
functional equivalent in the daylight pouring through the subterranean
galleries, bringing the interior spaces to life and producing as many
different experiences for viewing art as there are qualities of natural
light. The interplay between the interior and exterior—the blocks
rising above the surface are fundamentally vehicles for light, and the
landscape flows into and on top of the exhibition spaces—makes this one
of the most cap­tivating contemporary museum experiences since the
opening of the Tate Modern.

Designed by Steven Holl Architects (SHA) as a contemporary addition to
the bulky 1933 neoclassical Nelson-Atkins Museum, the Bloch Building’s
elegance and apparent simplicity disguise the enor­mous technical
complexity and careful material com­position required to produce its
light- and land-art effects. With exterior surfaces composed almost
entirely of translucent glass, the addition required some major
thinking to calibrate the sunlight pouring into the galleries; and
because the amount of light varies from season to season and during the
course of the day, it had to be balanced with electric light that would
consistently display the art to its greatest advantage. The museum
hired Richard Renfro, of Renfro Design Group, to do the mock-ups and
calculations, and to work with SHA senior partner Chris McVoy and
museum staff to find arch­itectural and technical solutions for
controlling daylight on the interior. Holl and McVoy describe the
addition as “built of volumes of light,” and with Renfro’s help, the
building is a rare instance when the hyperbole of architectural
rhetoric is actually surpassed by the reality of the experience.